Large File Of Evidence Is Available In Leak Case

By DAVID JOHNSTON

Published: January 1, 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31—
The special prosecutor appointed to lead the inquiry into who divulged the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer will be given access to a substantial investigative file compiled over the last three months. The file contains more than 30 interviews of Bush administration officials and a body of White House documents that investigators said could help crack the case.

The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago who was named on Tuesday to take over the case, will be armed with a full range of prosecutorial powers, including the authority to convene a grand jury to obtain sworn testimony from officials suspected of having knowledge of the matter.

With the interviews, documents and grand jury tools, law enforcement officials said on Wednesday that they are increasingly optimistic that Mr. Fitzgerald stands a strong chance of getting to the bottom of whether anyone in the administration improperly identified a C.I.A. officer to a newspaper columnist.

But despite the resurgent mood surrounding the case, investigators are said to doubt, at least for the moment, that anyone is likely to be prosecuted for disclosure of the identity of the officer even though the unauthorized disclosure of an undercover operative is a federal crime. That is because a prosecutor must show that a defendant knew that it was unlawful to disclose the name.

White House officials have denied that senior aides to President Bush disclosed the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, to Robert Novak, who wrote in his syndicated column last July that Ms. Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, was a C.I.A. employee. Mr. Wilson was a critic of the administration's Iraq policies.

Specifically, the White House has denied that Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, had any role in leaking the information to Mr. Novak. Mr. Rove is among the officials interviewed by F.B.I. agents, but so far none of them have been questioned under oath, officials said.

Investigators instructed the White House, the C.I.A., the Defense Department and the State Department not to destroy any records that could be considered relevant to the inquiry. But the White House is the only agency at which investigators are known to have demanded that officials actually turn over records.

The White House has turned over a number of documents, officials said, including notes of White House meetings, calendars, phone records and datebooks that officials have said provided telling clues about who within the administration may have had access to Ms. Plame's identity.

While some details of the evidence in the case are known, the overall status of the investigation has been difficult to gauge independently. It is not known, for example, whether the inquiry has focused on any single suspect.

The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have dropped an unusually heavy veil of secrecy over the leak investigation, at Attorney General John Ashcroft's insistence. Lawyers and agents have been required to sign nondisclosure agreements, and Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, assigned the case to an F.B.I. headquarters unit under close supervision of senior bureau officials.

Justice Department officials cautioned against reading too much into the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald. One department official said that the appointment did not indicate that the inquiry had compiled a critical mass of evidence that had forced Mr. Ashcroft's decision to step aside as the senior official in charge. Mr. Ashcroft's aides have said that the attorney general has been prepared all along to recuse himself to avoid even the appearance of a political conflict of interest.

Even so, attorneys general rarely voluntarily cede authority over big cases. And Mr. Ashcroft has maintained tight control during three months of increasingly harsh criticism from Democrats in the Senate who complained that he could not credibly lead an investigation that focused on the White House and on old friends like Mr. Rove, a former adviser to Mr. Ashcroft.

Associates of Mr. Fitzgerald said it seemed unlikely that he would have accepted the appointment if the investigation was likely to wind up as a dead-end case. Mr. Fitzgerald is highly respected among career prosecutors and longtime F.B.I. agents as one of the toughest legal adversaries in the Justice Department. One associate said, ''I'm sure the word is going out that the bulldog has arrived in town.''